Showing posts with label Timeless Infinite Light. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Timeless Infinite Light. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ted Rees

Ted Rees is a poet, essayist, and editor who lives and works in Philadelphia. His most recent book of poetry is Dog Day Economy, published by Roof Books in February 2022. Thanksgiving: a Poem, published by Golias Books in April 2020, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His first book of poetry, In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2018. Chapbooks include Dear Hole, Big Dearth in Whir, the soft abyss, and Outlaws Drift in Every Vehicle of Thought. Recent essays have been published in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk, Full Stop Quarterly, and ON Contemporary Practice’s monograph on New Narrative. He is editor-at-large for The Elephants, as well as founder and co-editor of Asterion Projects with Levi Bentley. Since summer of 2020, he has been running Overflowing Poetry Workshops, an extrainstitutional online workshop space.

1 - How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My most recent book, Dog Day Economy, is indebted to the prior book, Thanksgiving: a Poem, in that the latter is a book-length poem written entirely in haiku, and probably marks the first time where I really wrestled with "the line," so to speak. Previously, much of my work had relied on the rhythms and sonic textures of the longer line, but the syllabic restraint of the haiku forced me to reckon with the way shorter lines can allow more ambiguity and uncanniness into a poem. Dog Day Economy takes up many of the same issues that my previous work has addressed— nihilism, personhood, autonomy, the third landscape, drugs, violence, queerness— but does so in a way that hopefully feels less didactic and more about being a person within those concerns rather than person describing those concerns. It's also important to note that the book was written over the course of about nine months, six of which were the first six of the pandemic, so that references to surveillance, exposure, and catastrophe are much more present than in previous poems, in which these themes played no small part.  

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Honestly, these sorts of even broader genre boundaries don't mean much to me, because everything is poetry in one way or another.

Also honestly, when I was younger, I was told that my poems were more interesting than my fiction, so I focused my attention on poetry. I've always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I'm not sure I have the patience or discipline for it.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I have no idea how to answer this question— poems come how they come, and each has its own demands and constraints that can be broken depending on mood and whim. I do usually conceive of some sort of general idea for some poems in my head, but that's more to keep me on track whilst writing them, as I glide away from that general idea all the time when I'm actually writing.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Like some of my favorite poets, I tend to arrive at a loose subject or constraint as I begin a project— that is, I will often be writing a poem and think to myself, "You could keep writing poems within these sorts of boundaries" and things go from there. That said, I began Thanksgiving with a book-length poem in mind.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
The poet Evan Kennedy described Thanksgiving as a book of "honky ventriloquism"— that is, me utilizing the cadences and gestural utterances of white people as a way of getting at the soul death at the heart of whiteness. Doing public readings for that book allowed me to really push the idea that I never want to sublimate these voices into my own, but rather have them work as spoken gestures that are meant to be read and heard as other than my own. Almost like interruptions, or bad impressions.

I love giving readings, and I love attending them, too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The theoretical concerns of my recent writings have much to do with the boredom of suffering, but that's not really what you asked. In one of her essays on closed and open poems, Lyn Hejinian writes about the space between lines, phrases, the leaps in logic of parataxis that marks so much Language writing. I like to think that my writing is concerned with the space of those leaps, the unsaid elements of those spaces in language that are often elided. Instability.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The larger culture is mind detergent and soul rot, so I'm mostly interested in writing that works against it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have loved working with every editor I've had, and also love sharing work with others who are not necessarily the publishers of my work, but the readers and supporters of my work. Eric Sneathen has been particularly helpful in this latter regard— perhaps someday we will work together in a more formal capacity!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait."

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I find any prose writing to be torturous, and I agonize when I'm writing essays and reviews.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write every day, though sometimes more actively working toward a goal in mind. I do have a very active reading practice which begins in the morning, when I make sure to wake up early enough to read for about 30 minutes while drinking coffee and eating breakfast. This practice is essential to my mental and emotional well-being, and I become angry when it is interrupted.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Music with lyrics is a big one for me— dumb pop music, Guided by Voices, nasty lines from obscure R'n'B songs. I also listen to a lot of instrumental music, particularly jazz, but have recently been inspired by the band Crazy Doberman, a midwestern group that plays truly out there freeform music.

In terms of writing, I am always inspired by Hejinian, Jean Day, Prynne, Lisa Robertson, Clark Coolidge, Norma Cole, and recently, James Purdy.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My parents are also book fanatics, so their house has a sort of musty smell of books and old carpets. I like that.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I don't really think I can answer this question in any sort of sufficient way, partly because I don't think of my work as separate from any other forms.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I don't really think of an inside or outside of my work, but the writing of my friends is immensely important to my life, even if that is rarely evidenced in my work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Impossible question!

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I'm being real, I'd probably be a lawyer. I hate the legal system, grounded as it is on a field of pain and death, but I've done legal research and paralegal work, and I have a knack for understanding its machinations.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I love reading more than most activities, so that's a big part of it, probably.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently finished Far Out West by Clark Coolidge, which I enjoyed quite a lot. I admit to having a pretty lazy and uninspired film-watching practice at present, but we've been doing horror movies since the month began, and I loved Basket Case— so much of a world that no longer exists contained in a single film, kind of incredible.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I just finished a newish manuscript on cancer and counter-narrative, so at the moment, I'm mostly prepping for a commissioned essay on the cult gay filmmaker Curt McDowell, and searching for my next poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sunday, March 25, 2018

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Gabriel Ojeda-Sague


Gabriel Ojeda-Sague is a Miami <-> Philly gay, Latino Leo living in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of the poetry books Jazzercise is a Language (The Operating System, 2018), about the exercise craze of the 1980s, and Oil and Candle (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2016), on ritual and racism. He is also the author of chapbooks on gay sex, Cher, the Legend of Zelda, and anxious bilingualism. His third book Losing Miami, on the potential sinking of Miami due to climate change and sea level rise, is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’ve said before that my first chapbook JOGS taught me how to write. It was an experiment in using the same words as are in the 1977 book The Joy of Gay Sex to create poems. Though I have some regrets about how I did it, the writing taught me a lot and my language today is very similar to what that book is like. I still revel in the kind of campiness beside darkness that is found there. Nowadays, my work is less guided by conceptual constraint, which motivated much of my early work, and I am less afraid of talking about myself. Whether that’s good or bad, I’m not quite sure yet. I’m still interested, however, in taking on close analysis of media people find unworthy, as I do in Jazzercise is a Language.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Actually, I didn’t come to poetry first! In fact, my reading and writing both started in fiction. As a teen, I read a lot of Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf. I basically had a big thing for the modernist titans. I tried writing stories for a bit, even did a few in college, but I could never stick with the practice. If I blame it on a personal flaw, it might be that I just struggle to write narrative. I guess I’m not very interested in telling a story. I’m interested in trickery more so. I started reading poetry when I was exposed to poets. Other than a few, I really didn’t read poetry until college. And it took reading poetry to feel like I could and should write poetry. And it stuck.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
When it comes to book length projects, it tends to start at an idea, or even a phrase. And I try to write thinking of this idea to see where it might take me. For example, Jazzercise is a Language started with exactly that phrase, said after watching a compilation of Judi Sheppard Missett and commenting on the specific words she was using. And I thought it was a nice phrase and could mean something in practice on the page. So, I started working from that idea: what is the language of Jazzercise and how can you play with it. And I started to write out based on these ideas. What I had I thought was pretty convincing, so I decided to embark on it and see how far it took me. And then I had a book. I basically think the best way to know if a project is viable is to start writing it. This is also why I end up trashing a lot of projects. Once the thing is done, I tend to edit little. Not because I’m against it, I just find nothing inspiring in the process, personally.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem almost always starts as a phrase I think of. I usually write these phrases in a note on my phone and when I make time to write I see where they might take me. For example, the phrase “a beehive is someone’s backdrop” came to me in the shower, randomly, and for while I couldn’t figure out where to go with it. One day I was writing a poem, one that began because I decided I wanted a poem that started with the words “Simply put” (which, because I’m me, I thought was really funny) and I came to part where I described never being alone, and I thought hey! it’s like living in a scene that is a beehive! And so, I switched the phrase to “this backdrop is someone’s beehive” and stuck it in the poem where it works quite well. So, the poems come like that, as if from a room in my brain that occasionally lets out odd phrases.

I don’t tend to collect poems into books. When I am writing a book, a mode I feel very comfortable with, I am thinking of it as a book the entire time. Very rarely am I surprised to find that I have a book. Individual poems, or page poems, I see almost as a test field for me. Where I am doing my most serious and committed work is in a book. An individual poem is like a short test for ideas of mine, and will likely never be collected into a book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Oh, they’re hugely part of it! I don’t know if it’s clear to a reader, but I focus a lot on the sounds of words and often will put in lines only because of the sounds of them. I’m working always on sound. So I love to read the poems aloud. I’ve said before that I find the reading to be an instance of the poem, and not necessarily a truer or falser version of the poem. Implicit in that is that the written version is also just an instance of the poem.

But the bigger reason readings are important to me is because my work is only possible because of the community of poets in Philadelphia, where I live now. The community meets in readings and similar events and we grow together. It’s amazing what my peers do. And I’m really blessed any time I can read for them and any time I get to see them read.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? / 7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
If you don’t mind, I’m combining two of your questions because I think they are related. I have held for a long time that writing does not “do” anything. I do not believe in an “activist poetics” as such. Instead, I think writing does something quieter. I think that the book creates a climate in the mind, for a question to be warmed, an anxiety cooled, or an apparatus bothered. In other words, I see poetry as the making of a simulation of thinking and experience, so that others can tune into the simulation in whatever way they deem right for themselves. This is what I believe the writer can do, ask others to interface. When it comes to me, I choose to write on issues of gayness, Latinidad, exilism and marginalized media. This is because my mind comes to these issues often. I find it interesting to consider the media we take in and how we can analyze it. I find my life to be composed of and enriched by these sister identities (gay, Latino, child of Cuban exiles) so I write in relation to them. My overarching question is how does the gay Latino subject read the world. But my poetry on this, with its specific edge, does the same work as somebody else’s poetry on a different subject, which is to simulate the mind on record.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I hope that I’m an easy writer to work with! I try to recognize the work editors are putting in, especially in the small press world, especially when nobody is being paid, and when I do recognize that, a lot of the decisions and changes they suggest are easier to swallow. I can usually take the small changes that come with editing a manuscript, and I’m lucky to have never had an editor who truly wanted to take a knife to my work. You’ve always got to give a little room and recognize that your poem draft is not the end-all-be-all text of the poem, and that it can change in the publishing process, but you also can’t accept being stepped on. I just want to make sure every change is a conversation.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The best advice I’ve heard is the way CA Conrad talks about imaginary careers. I don’t have an exact quote off hand, but he has said before that there is no reason a poet should step on others to defend or build up their imaginary career. Like Ashbery says, there is no such thing as a famous poet. And almost none of us, at least in the small press world, are making money off of this stuff. So better to be generous and help others grow in writing than to stomp forward until you have—what? the nothing career of poets. Nobody should be writing for fame. When I choose that I want fame more than other things, I’ll become a Youtuber.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to short stories)? What do you see as the appeal?
When I was young I wanted to write in every genre, as I mentioned above, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve committed full heartedly to poetry. I see my essay practice as a critical one, not as a “creative nonfiction” practice, so it’s easier to separate mentally. As in, here is my creative practice (poetry), here is my critical (nonfiction). It’s a very reductive binary, but sometimes setting that binary up can help you clear your thoughts. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything that wasn’t a poem or an essay. Maybe one day I’ll return to it.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My typical day doesn’t include writing, I’m ashamed to say. My typical day goes like this: wake up, go to work, come home, work second job remote, make dinner (unless it’s my partner’s turn), play a video game, read, go to bed. I know a lot of people who write every day, but it’s just never been my thing. So, what I typically end up doing is, if I don’t have a current project in progress, saying to myself “jeez, I should try to write something today” and I’ll dedicate a bit of time to doing that and see what comes out. But if I have a current project, I’m like an animal. I write fast and edit very little. Oil and Candle took me 2 weeks to write, Jazzercise is a Language took me a semester. When I’ve got a good idea going, I can really hammer into it. It’s the “off season” that is a little tough.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The text in the room around me is the best immediate remedy. My apartment is full of prints and posters with text on them. And of course, every home has a lot of objects with text on them: food containers, clothing, toiletries. If I am stumped in the middle of a line, looking for a good word, I scan around me and see what I can find. If it’s a more serious stump, that is a tougher question to answer.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Humidity.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I’d say my biggest non-book-artist influences are Stephen Sondheim, drag queens, and certain musical ladies like Björk, Cher, Bernadette Peters, and Joni Mitchell. I also get a lot of my tender heartedness from gay visual artists, with a big focus on Cy Twombly, Tom of Finland, and David Hockney.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Oh, I could fill a lot of pages here. Let me be brief, but divide this into two categories. The authors I tend to read the most and who affect my work from that reading are: CA Conrad, Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Sawako Nakayasu, Caroline Bergvall, Samuel Delany, Yoko Ono, David Melnick, Brandon Shimoda, and Rosmarie Waldrop. The writers who are my big in-person influences and who help me in the lived experience of being a writer: Raquel Salas-Rivera, Emji Spero, Julia Bloch, Alina Pleskova, Roberto Harrison, Emma Sanders, Andy Emitt, and Frank Sherlock. And you can really throw in the whole Philly poetry scene as influences on me and my work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to write a song and sing it in a public setting. It has long been a dream, but there are lots of barriers to entry there, many of which are only psychological.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
The boys of my immediate family are/were musicians, so that feels like the natural step. I used to play oboe (the details for why I stopped are for another time) and I really loved it. I miss playing oboe and somewhere in me there’s a symphony member. Every time I hear the sound of it, I feel like I have a sun lamp shining on my collarbone.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
What made me write was how many good books I was reading and seeing in the world. I needed to put myself there.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Ann Lauterbach’s Clamor. But that is an old book. The last great book I read from this year was Mark Johnson’s Can of Human Heat. And that’s one too many people are sleeping on. The most recent great film I watched happened to be Death Becomes Her. Somehow, as a gay man, I hadn’t seen that movie until Halloween 2017. But the last great film I saw in the theaters was easily The Witch.

20 - What are you currently working on?
For the first time in a while, I actually don’t have any current committed book length projects. I’m testing out many ideas right now and letting myself be a free spirit. But one thing I am trying to put energy into is a series of love poems. I know, an experimentalist doing a love poem, sounds romantic, but hey, they’re pretty good I think.



Friday, March 10, 2017

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brittany Billmeyer-Finn



Brittany Billmeyer-Finn is a queer poet and playwright living in Northampton, MA where she is an aspiring social worker in the Smith College MSW program. Her full length book, the meshes, written through the filmography of Maya Deren is out from Black Radish Books. In 2015 she directed her first play, the meshes: an interaction in 2 acts at SAFEhouse Arts in SF. Her collection Slabs is available from Oakland based small press Timeless Infinite Light. Slabs is a collection of poetry dealing in and out of the body through various sites; home, memory, books and ritual. She continues to investigate a queer poetics and the influences of magic on various blogs.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, the meshes came out with Black Radish Books in 2015. It was a project I stayed with for about 4 years. I was very dedicated to this project. It made me uncomfortable in some ways. It intrigued me. I was motivated to investigate Maya Deren’s work and her autobiography which became a practice of looking inward. I was moved by her filmography and I appreciated the poetics of her short films, the bodies relationship to time and location, the way she never seemed to complete a project everything always unfinished and always with a lingering possibility …this unfinishedness spoke to something about my own developing poetics. I was also critical of Deren’s work. When writing through and about her documentary film, The Divine Horsemen the Living Gods of Haiti shot from 1947-1954, the unfinished film focused on Haitian Voudon ritual particularly dance and possession, I questioned Deren’s motivation and my own to see this project through and wondered about her inability to complete it and if she had this question too? There was a lot of projection happening. Anyway, this is to question and consider the dangers and stakes of alliance and intention, the colonial gaze and ways in which to push up against the passivity of spectatorship. This work required as all work should, a constant intention of looking inward and examining my own positionality as an artist- this work of constant self-reflection also extends beyond the text and into my relationships, politics and alliances.

The book became then about iteration and transformation. That each section of the book informed the next and transformed itself as it moved into new contexts, became embodied and performable. This is true of the organization of the text, which is written in four parts moving from poetry, to essay, to a play to a sort of polyvocal score named the “annotated bibliography.”

Significantly, I think it was only possible for this text to evolve the way it did because of the amount of time and the various life contexts I was in and out of while I was writing it. I wrote it while living in Oakland,  while in grad school, while having a queer awakening, meeting my dearest friends, my most inspiring collaborators, while falling in love, after grad school, while working as a shopgirl, moving into a new apartment, teaching creative writing to high schoolers, co-creating an interdisciplinary pedagogy for a queer camp for young folks and throughout various life things, mundane day to day things and the trajectory of the book changed as my life did as I became more open, more at home.

I guess to actually answer your question, “How did your first book change your life?” I might say that it didn’t change my life all by itself but it was connected to the present moment. It is an object I was able to bring to life, literally in directing an adaptation of the play section of the book, the meshes: an iteration in 2 acts, but also I wasn’t writing this book in a vacuum. It was so influenced by my friends and collaborators who embodied the text on stage and on the page, who populated my life and influenced my artistic practice as well as my state of being.

While I wrote the meshes I also wrote another manuscript, Slabs.

Slabs was published in December 2016 by small press Timeless Infinite Light as a part of its Tracts series. This book is very different from the meshes. I wrote it while traveling to Northampton, MA a few years ago (little did I know just a few years later I would live there and be going to school for social work) to visit a dear friend and poet, Rebecca Maillet. I was taking a break from the meshes, which is a much more project based and conceptually minded piece.

In Slabs, I just wrote about myself in relation to my surroundings, my relationships, I wrote about my queerness, about my mother and best friends from MI, I wrote about being in love, about accountability, I wrote about magic and ritual about feeling awkward. It is like I peeled myself out of the meshes and looked all around me and felt my body. So in some way it is connected to the process of writing the meshes, it is what the meshes is not, the subject is me and it is grounded in my own language and experience. It is just the thing it is, which is sort of plain, sincere, tender, nostalgic, located in significant sites of my life, among significant people and with a bit of magic.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not sure I did come to poetry first but it is the thing that stuck. I started writing as an awkward preteen. I wrote a series of short stories about a group of teens experimenting with sex, drugs and opinions in an abandoned tree house. It was so cliché but so much a part of understanding what writing can do for the developing self. I came to poetry in high school and took every class with Chris Tysh at Wayne State University in undergrad. It was in her classes that I was offered the many possibilities of poetry, the interdisciplinary possibilities, the performativity of it, the practice and the process of it, the intuitive, improvisational, the ways in which poetry is simultaneous in its nothingness and somethingness.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
My process is pretty inconsistent depending on what is going on in my life. With the meshes I spent periods of time fixating and obsessing and creating new forms and experimenting with the text, oscillating between writing myself into the work and keeping myself out of it.

Slabs wasn’t as rigorous, I sort of needed it, a sort of grounding touchstone. I wrote it in a week’s time. Tinkering with it here and there until it found a home with Timeless Infinite Light.

The last couple years, I find myself sitting in bed (bed is where I do most of my writing) surrounded by a pile of books of different subjects and a deck of tarot. I read and interpret tarot cards. I’ve been really fixated on this little book of saints lately…and I write my interpretation and encounter with these various texts until I have enough gobbily gook on the page to investigate what is there.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Like I said, gobbily gook.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Iteration is a significant part of my poetics that came out of the meshes project. I am excited to see how many different things I can make with the same material. With the meshes after writing the first 2 sections, “the poems” and “the essay,” I started adding voices to my readings, giving out parts to my friends to add layers to the text, to embody it somehow, this evolution is what inspired writing “the play.” the meshes: an iteration in 2 acts may not have happened without the opportunity to share the work at various readings, in new spaces.

I recently had my book release for Slabs in New York City and I realized as I stood up in front of the room that I was rusty, my voice shaky, I lost my breath a couple of times but Slabs is a tender text and so my vulnerability then was also true to the work and that felt ok. The response of my body as I stood in front of the room, allowing myself to be present in that then was soothing in a way.

I consider readings to be an opportunity to present the text in a new way, to utilize the space, to consider the site as part of the text itself, to embody it is significant to my practice.

and

 I feel like my feelings of readings can be summed up from a page in “part one” of Slabs: to be invited into these rooms/to turn my back to these rooms/wanting to run out of theses rooms/to charm these rooms/to empathize with these rooms/to dig a hole for these rooms (18).

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?
What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

What can poetry do?
What is lost in poetry?
What are my alliances?
What is my socio cultural position and how does it influence my view, how does this influence my artistic practice and manifestation?
What are the political and personal stakes?
Is authenticity a social construct?
Who is erased? What is being left out?
What is a queer poetics?
What are the ethics of this?
What is the role of community, how is it connective, how does it fail?
What are the value systems present, what do they push up against? Are they complicit?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he, they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
To me this is a question about the relationship between the personal and the political, which I think are inextricable, the same way I believe poetry can never be apolitical. There is also something about community here, an archive, a context, a moment in time. I’ve already expressed the significance of collaboration in my writing process. I guess writers have an opportunity to create a story, writer’s voices in relationship that offers various significant realities and interpretations of their life and time. It’s not to say that writers are sacred. I think I said something about poetry being simultaneously something and nothing. I think a writer’s role is also definable by their intersectional experience, this map of oppressions and privileges that speaks to the individual experience and historical implications of the contemporary moment. This intersectional view then becomes a poignant location, I mean context yes, and self-awareness, which is a significant role for myself, and accountability, opening oneself to critique, to response and not closing the door to the labor of calling out/in. I think if the writer is doing political work, then it cannot stop at the page. I also think the role of the writer varies depending on the privilege of the person writing. I read a post on Facebook by a writer that said, as a white person it is not my job to write about racism but white supremacy.

As an aspiring social worker who is currently interning in the field, I also find writing to play a therapeutic role with clients, being heard, telling a story that is one’s own and the possibility for agency and validation in that moment can be powerful. So a writer’s role then is not homogenous, it varies, it is the intersection between the personal and the political and it cannot stand alone on the page though the act of visioning and imagining a different political and social configuration is part of the work.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
“Working with” is essential, I suppose differentiating collaborators and editors is something symbolic of the relationship of institutions and community this sort of both/and moment. I really appreciate the experiences and supports of the small presses I’ve worked with, this way of needing each other and supporting each other as part of the work.

After graduating from Mills College MFA program in 2012, some friends and I began our own little workshop where we shared, interpreted and offered feedback to one another. We wanted a non-institutional space in which to engage with one another’s work.  

In the final stages of the meshes, my friend and poet, Cosmo Spinosa offered his editing skills and we would meet at Mills College and sit on the lawn and read the meshes out loud and make edits as we went through while eating grilled cheese and smoking cigarettes.

My dear friend, writer, book and performance artist Kate Robinson has been in process of interpreting the meshes into an artist book series, another iteration of the text. She also designed the cover of the meshes and so every time I look at it I think of her.

Working with Black Radish Books to edit the incredibly dense text of the meshes felt supportive and exciting as the book was becoming an object.

So many times I felt lost in the process and so many times I had collaborators and editors to be an anchor.

In directing the play, meshes: an iteration in 2 acts, Portland based artist and musician Stella Peach created a score, interpreting the text into music, what an amazing moment to hear the translation of the work into sound.

Timeless Infinite Light, who makes beautiful books, turned Slabs into this magical object. It’s like a little spell, a talisman and I get to share the pages with Phyllis Ma an amazing visual artist and I get to be a part of the Timeless archive which brings new and exciting meaning to this little collection of work that feels so bound up inside my body. It is healing to have it become something by the hands of talented people who have vision and intention. It offers so much more to the experience of making something. I guess my preferred mode of writing is both the solitariness of it and then the ways in which it transforms by the hands of others.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
In the early iterations of the meshes, in a grad school workshop my instructor asked, “What are your alliances?” This is a question I ask as I write, always.

From Dean Spade’s Normal Life, “engaging in constant reflection and self-evaluation. And it is about practice and process rather than a point of arrival, resisting hierarchies of truth and reality and instead naming and refusing state violence.”

And this from a conversation with the brilliant Tessa Micaela, “Because being silent is a privileged position, one of the ways privilege shows up is the ability to be silent without repercussion. Being silent means that we remove ourselves from the process of working through the ways in which we unconsciously exercise our privilege every day.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to plays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think I have sort of named this idea of iteration as part of my poetics. With the meshes it was a process of allowing myself to show up in the text. But I didn’t want to be there alone. It was also an opportunity to create a sort of ritual out of the process of writing the poems and essay. This ritualizing then became the place where the questions could show up and reveal themselves.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Right now I am writing so much. It is not always this way. I just moved across the country with my partner and dog, I started a new master’s program and am doing new work. I am a beginner again. It has been a difficult process and because of the complexity of all the moving parts and figuring out how to be a person, poet, social worker, partner, friend and activist in a new setting, under a new regime, writing has been one way to allow the feelings to arise, to allow myself to feel the thing rising in my throat. My instinct is to push it down into my gut, but that’s not working anymore in any area of my life and so I write it, which is only one step in a much larger process of relationship building, showing up and being present.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Usually my tarot deck

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
It sort of depends on which home? One of my best friends since high school, (from MI, where I grew up), you know cosmic soul friends (a phrase I have stolen from another dear friend) has always had a particular smell and so every time I smell some combination of lilacs and patchouli I think of her, which is the same as thinking of home.

The smell of the top of my dog, Patsy’s head reminds me of the little apartment my partner and I shared in Oakland. It was this weird carpeted octagonal apartment and it was our first place together and I miss it all the time.

This particular musty smell of old books reminds me of the apartment I shared with Kate Robinson and Cheena Marie Lo in Oakland that we named the Tender Oracle. The front steps had this particular smell, so while walking up the stairs of the tender (for short), I would be transported to a used bookstore in Detroit that I used to frequent creating a thread between Detroit and Oakland. Now, that particular mustiness transports me from Northampton to Oakland, walking up those front steps of that little home we made together where we hosted a reading series, Manifest for three years. I’m so grateful for this time and the intentionality of the space we created together.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Any kind of encounter whether it be with an object, a person, a piece of art or music, bearing witness to something, eaves dropping on a conversation, old trauma playing out in the present moment all has the possibility of becoming poetry.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have been doing an interview series for Drunken Boat called “Blessed Be” where I interview predominately queer writers, makers, performers about their work, their perception of a queer poetics and their relationship to magic. Having the opportunity to talk to and learn from writers like Cheena Marie Lo, Tessa Micaela, Zoe Tuck, Mai Doan, Coda Wei, Arisa White, Fisayo Adeyeye, Moss Angel Witchmonstr, Stella Peach, Marcus Lund, Zach Ozma and Mariama Lockington has been an incredible experience and I’m excited to continue with this project.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Thinking in terms of iterations of work, I would love to create an installation inspired by Slabs. What is a Slab? What is its visual configuration of tenderness, sincerity, memory, queerness? For some reason I picture a lot of sequins and yarn.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I am not just a writer. I have been a shopgirl for a long time and now I am working on my Masters of Social Work at Smith College. So I guess I envision myself as a therapist, as someone working in human services.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’m not sure, it was just always the thing, way back I was collaborating with my friends in grade school. We were making books out of construction paper. A childhood friend I have known since like age 8, makes fun of me because I was so bossy about it (I’m an only child) I would insist that she draw the pictures and I write the story. I have since become a better collaborator and that is in fact my favorite way to generate work and foundational to my practice.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished reading Krupskaya’s latest releases, The Braid by Lauren Levin and Snail Poems by Eric Sneathen, these two people and books are so moving and books I will return to time and time again. I am also very much anticipating MG Roberts new book, Anemal, Uter Meck coming out from Black Radish Books and Mariama Lockington’s chapbook, The Lucky Daughter from Damaged Goods Press.

I have been sick recently with the flu, so I have been in bed cuddling my chihuahua, drinking tea and watching The Book of Conrad, The Punk Singer and Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I just finished a manuscript about myth, work, friendship and Oakland. Now am working on a collection, currently titled, “Sessions” that is very wrapped up in my present self and circumstances of change and transition, a bit from this work that kind of sums up the present moment from which I write is this: this feeling of ok, I can do this/ the place where I am most injured/so capable of traumatizing each other/what’s yours & what’s mine?/should you be able to heal me?/I’m all confused/I sort of believe in everything/I mean to say my co-dependence, I mean to say simultaneity & loss/the places where it becomes about control/this is how the energy works/I don’t even get it/what the fuck is taking care?/this pulse in there/that resonates with me/if only I could feel it in my body /when did I unlearn this? /I can feel the pulse of that/to get in deeply/that frozen need